Thursday, April 23, 2015

Balderdash

The people of the world are continuously bombarded with
dreary predictions. The predictions keep changing, but the intent is the same.
Science is never involved, just emotion and innuendo. Our government scientists
cannot even make up their minds about what foods and food related products are
good for us. We have been prompted for years to take vitamins, now some are
saying taking vitamins may cause cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Famine is a good one. The first famine scare I am aware of
was recorded in the 1800’s in England when Thomas Malthus predicted we had to
cut the world population or we would starve to death. The idea pops up again
occasionally. We are still here and the population is still growing. There may
be a limit, but soothsayers will never predict it.

Most of us do not remember the DDT scare caused by Rachel
Carson and her book “Silent Spring.” DDT saved about 500,000 lives by
preventing malaria in many parts of the world. Carson’s book was filled with
misinformation that created hysteria and true believers caused panic to outlaw
DDT. Since then the world has lost about seven million people that would have
lived without the ban. Carson does get credit for creating the environmentalist
movement, which continues her legacy of causing harm to the world, as we pass
another Earth Day.

Some of us do remember the threat of the new ice age from
the 1970’s. Well those same people are back, but this time the problem is
global warming. Then Al Gore said, “Oh wait. It’s not warming, so let’s just scare’em
with climate change.”

Balderdash. Balderdash I say. I think the key to our intake
is moderation. Every body is a different chemistry experiment. Some people
thrive on foods that cause problems for other people. Soothsays are with us
always, predicting doom and gloom. Kooks are easily able to round up a few
people to follow them – sometimes even high level government officials -- maybe
even a President.

Most people do not see the big picture. Oh, they see the big
picture as we are accustomed to thinking. But think about several trillion
stars with more power than our sun and we do not even have an understanding of
our sun’s power. We know the numbers that scientists have provided for us, but we
do not understand about being burned to a crisp and disappearing by getting within
ten million miles of the sun. People do not normally think in millions of
miles. Even long haul truck drives still think in hundreds.

It takes a lot of arrogance to think we can predict the
temperature of this earth a hundred years in the future. We have control of
diddly squat in the grand scheme of things. We can kill all the energy in the
world and the same things will happen, except it will happen in the dark – eek,
no TV.